19 January 2011

The Housemaid

The charge most often leveled at the director of Oldboy, Park Chan-Wook, is that he's a vapid stylist. He's not the only one! The Housemaid, the latest from Park's South Korean compatriot and fellow Seoul native, Im Sang-soo, is spiffy, sexy and super-shallow, a far cry from its politically scathing original. In that 1960 film, directed by Kim Ki-young, bourgeois materialism got its comeuppance in the form of a mentally unstable and domestically destabilizing servant. Either there's no longer any shame in middle-class morality (are they disappearing in Korea like in the U.S.?) or Im Sang-soo just isn't a radical: he updates the story by setting it among the inarguably odious super wealthy, ancien riche identifiable not just by their cavernous home but their taste for opera, red wine and gourmet food, whose ample leftovers bypass fridge for trash.